Note Woolf’s pronoun usage, especially in the story’s opening paragraphs.Why does she deliberately shift among first-, second-, and third-person perspectives?

What will be an ideal response?



  • Poet and critic R. S. Gwynn addresses this issue as follows:



“A Haunted House” is clearly an experimental piece, using such Modernist techniques as fragmentation, repetition, and multiple perspectives, the same methods that T. S. Eliot, a frequent visitor to Bloomsbury, would employ in his famous poem of the same year, The Waste Land. Cubism, just coming into vogue in painting, seems most relevant to the story’s opening, where the perspective rapidly shifts from “you” to “us” to “they’re” to “one” to “I” in a few sentences. The deliberate ambiguity in pronoun reference has the effect of merging the presence of the couple who presently occupy the house with that of the longdead pair who haunt it. Since the story has no exposition in the usual sense, the reader is challenged to fill in the blanks.

Language Arts & World Languages

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Quando mio padre (essere) giovane, (abitare) a Siderno. ______________________________ / ______________________________

Decidete tra l’imperfetto e il passato prossimo. (Decide between the imperfetto and the passato prossimo.)

Language Arts & World Languages

Select the letter of the item that is not parallel with the other items in the group.

A) threw B) battled C) pitch D) caught

Language Arts & World Languages

Circle the correct form of the word in parentheses

Which of the two lamps looks (best, better) on Mom's desk? What will be an ideal response?

Language Arts & World Languages

Insert a comma or a semicolon in each sentence, and indicate what you have done by writing in the blank the correct abbreviation: C—comma; S—semicolon

The underdeveloped countries have about 69 percent of the world's adults however, they have about 80 percent of the world's children. What will be an ideal response?

Language Arts & World Languages